Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday March 11, 2012 @11:11AM
from the people-pay-for-things-they-want dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Double Fine Adventure, the crowd-funded adventure game from Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert (of Monkey Island fame), just crossed the $2.5 million mark in funding on Kickstarter. So far, about 73,000 enthusiastic backers have contributed an average of $35 dollars each, with 3 extravagant backers going as far as to contribute $10,000 (earning them a lunch with Schafer and Gilbert, among other goodies). The total sum is over 6 times the amount Schafer and Gilbert were initially hoping to raise ($400,000). Schafer released a few pictures showing what he's doing with all the money. The project has received attention in mainstream media (sort of), with NPR's Morning Edition covering the story."

Crowd-funding is how entertainment will work in the the not too distant future, as far as creators are concerned:

0) Start by making something good, although probably for free, thus starting to build a reputation;1) Offer to do something, for money, proportional to your reputation;2) Get funded by the crowd;3) Deliver a good end result, and with it improve your reputation;4) Loop back to 1 as much as you need or want;5) Retire.

For 2.5 Million we could fund the same effort or more and enrich the commons with a high quality opensource game that would allow a wide array of derivative. Instead the commons is robbed and is given a proprietary game.

Slashdot should not be posting kickstarters for software and other things that aren't free/libre open source licensed or creative commons licensed.

Use kickstarter to compensate creative people for their effort, but pay them to contribute to the commons as well.

AC had a good point. Creativity is generally not improved by rewards, and there are other ways to support people than linking the right to consume with an increasingly precarious income-through-jobs link. We could have had $2.5 million of free stuff, and now we are getting yet more proprietary stuff.